This is the continuation of a series of Podcasts started in Episode #506.

(Martha) I remember seeing one time years ago someone who was very resistant to God’s will. You won’t know who it is. And I was praying, and I suddenly saw what hard work it is to resist being where Jesus wants you to be. It’s hard work. And it took more energy than I would ever want to expend trying to escape Him. You can do it. It can be done. If you really want to be out of it, you can be. God will let you have your way. But it’s the church that has the keys, the church together, in order, when the church is in order. And we have no idea how many people looked… Someone wrote us, I think it was in a comment saying, “You are church. You are my church.” So, time is no boundary. Miles are no boundary. Distance is no difficulty. The only difficulty is number 1) faith and number 2) surrender. But we’ve got to get it in this group that we have the authority in Christ as His vessel. Not as doing anything apart from Him, but as His vessel, that authority of Christ against hell resides in us. And we can say, “Be gone in Jesus’ name.” When we are led by the Spirit and inspired by what we are learning. And it’s no accident that I’m learning about life and death again, learning there are only two issues: light and dark, love and hate, life and death. And everything is one or the other. And I wanted to go back to what I shared with you this morning. Dave quoted a movie that said, “The devil loves vanity.” And someone said, “Pride?” And Dave said, “No. The quote was vanity.” And I went home on fire with that word, because vanity is the evidence of pride. And when Satan really wants you, he appeals to your vanity. The most empty character in the Bible, the most useless, astonishingly stupid and ignorant character in the Bible is Solomon in Ecclesiastes. The Queen of Sheba came to see him and was stunned by his wisdom, but what he wrote 36 times in that book is the word vanity, and vanity is the word of the devil. The word means, “worthless, empty breath,” meaning just a “pufff.” 2 Kings 17 says, “They went after vanities and became vane.” Another translation, that same one is NIV, “They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves.” I wrote someone today and said, “What and who has been your idol?” It means vapor. It’s empty. Vanity is totally empty, and what you gain by vanity is absolutely worthless. I think this was the commentary on the word. It came from the Hebrew definition of vanity in Strong’s. “There are two inexorable principles of vanity. 1) Every person takes to some degree the character and nature of the god he worships. 2) The characteristic of all false gods is that they destroy their worshippers.” Isn’t that stunning? That’s inexorable. That means that it can’t be moved and changed. It is ever, ever a law of this universe. “The characteristic of all false gods is that they destroy their worshippers.” That means – do you want me to go to the end, to the inexorable again? It’s inexorable, two inexorable principles. That means it is a fixed law of this universe. It cannot ever be avoided. It can never be skirted. If you live for vanity, and you are determined to be ambitious, you will become as empty as the vanity is, as empty as the false god of ambition or whatever your god is. You will be as empty and useless and worthless a person in this world as your wooden idol. Now, we were going through something this weekend together, and Carole saw it as a spiritual evidence of something. And I really believe that the spiritual condition is visibly manifested. How can it not be? The spiritual condition or in this case where the assault of the enemy is will become practically visible. It will appear, so you can see it. And Carole proved it this morning, because she came over and sat down and defined… Can you tell about it? (Carole) Well, I said to Martha, my fence around my garden has been good for years. I mean I haven’t had a problem with varmints getting in there, deer getting in there, but this year has been different. And there’s been a groundhog that has tenaciously made his way into the garden. And I tried several ways to keep him out, and he tenaciously found a way to get in. And I hired somebody to come over and help me shore up the fence so he couldn’t get in any longer. And it worked for several weeks. And then… (Martha) Tell them what damage it did to life. (Carole) Oh, that thing came in, and I had a whole new area of cucumbers planted. They were about 3 inches high, so they had just started sprouting their leaves, and I went out in the morning, and I stood there, and I was heartsick because there were these little green 3 inch poles, no leaves left. And I said… Oh, I got so mad. I just got so mad. I said, “You, you rascal, you are so…!” And later what was so strange is I went back down to the garden and went into the gate… Now, this is after I worked hard to shore up two sides of the fence. I mean worked hard. And I went into the garden, and all of a sudden I see this thing, and I realize that it is a groundhog fleeing across the garden. And I follow him, and he’s gone out. I see exactly where he’s gone out. So, he has exposed his entrance and exit to me! (Martha) Uh Oh! That’s it! (Carole) Uh oh! Well, I could go into a lot of detail on what the Lord has done, but he came in… he even ate the top of the squash plants. And I said, “Now how did he even get up there?” And I had this picture of him just sitting up there in the box eating the tops of these…! And my sweet potatoes, I was just furious! I was just furious, because this was the fruit of my labor that he is coming in to destroy. And I began to see this as spiritually what was happening, because in the last podcast we talked about the Lord setting a parameter, a fence around us as a church, individually and as a church. And oh, in the midst of that I turned to Nehemiah and I realized it’s the building of the wall. There is a building of the wall, and the Lord is calling for the building of the wall. And whatever He is building there, there has to be a wall of exit and entrance. But I saw that it was… I see that groundhog as representative obviously of the enemy, of Satan, coming in to kill and destroy the life, to kill and destroy the fruit of labor of God’s will. That garden was planted out of God’s will and out of His… in obedience to Him. And he is coming in and in one night destroying what has been sown. And the same thing happened down there at the sweet potato garden, and that had to be shorn up as well, and it has been. The Lord is solving that. But He is making us aware of the vulnerable areas, because Dave said on the way up today that he can see where this rascal is digging at the front of the fence trying to find another place, and he’s looking for the places of vulnerability. And I see this as the Holy Spirit is looking for the places of vulnerability in our little body and He is shoring it up. And Martha’s last CD of the month, “I Am a Child of God,” I mean, it just pierced me through. And I know that He was exposing vulnerable areas in my own personal life, and I got so excited. And I had the victory of Christ. Just, I mean, it was… I said, “Oh, my gosh, He is exposing my belief in my own physical heredity.” That is a place the enemy gets in constantly, and I’m mad. I’m mad. And He is exposing it so that we can throw out the old, renounce and throw out what is a lie and bring in the new through faith. Proclaim what Christ has done. And He is shoring up this body. He is putting the fence, He is shoring up this body to protect and increase the bounty of the fruit of the labor that comes out and through Him.

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